Our own ways
by Darth Krande
Summary: Rey becomes the most powerful scavenger the Jedi and Sith had ever seen. Not everybody is happy with her choice, but it's in her blood not to care about that. Divergence from a scene near the end of the last movie, so if you haven't yet seen it, please just bookmark and come back later.


Reaching out, she could feel Ben approaching. A friendly face on this immensely hostile world – home to only the most horrible being in the entire galaxy, a death trap to many millions of others. Had all the soldiers on those many ships been conscripted as small children? How many had died before earning the honour to fight (and be killed) for this evil?

But there was no time for these questions. Her focus returned to the present. Here and now she was talking to her own grandfather, the only known person she had any blood connection with. She willed herself to ignore her questions about the world outside, and cleared her mind of all the doubts regarding her own self.

She knew what she had to do.

And she would do it, she knew she could. She had done so before. More than once.

For these past few minutes, Emperor Palpatine had been presenting a blatantly obvious target, with the warning that an attack on his shriveled, bleached, old and fragile-looking body would corrupt her far more than 'only' sharing the dark throne with him. For minutes, he'd been taunting her with the power that would be hers if she would give in to this dense darkness.

The dark one was chanting now, as if finalizing a deal between his descendant and the surrounding darkness. He offered himself as the sacrifice to eternally bond an abandoned scavenger to a galaxy-wide power of destruction.

She focused as Master Skywalker had shown her, as General Leia had explained, as she had read in the sacred Jedi texts. She focused and observed.

Palpatine, the old one, the only one (was he the only one?) was held up by a one-person sized elevator, or a bizarre crane with an open chamber. This man had admittedly returned from death because of his bond to Darkness, but he was also weak and wounded, unhealed with his sick connection to destruction.

Sick, she focused even deeper. Everything about Emperor Palpatine was sick, because apparently, blurring the line between life and nonexistence belonged to the darkest powers, while healing was a work of Light.

The two abilities didn't even make sense without each other.

The crane / elevator positioned Palpatine right in front of her. Now, she could do as she pleased, he would be defenceless. Her young eyes fell on the pale white orbs with which no man could see, and she smiled ever so slightly, then she covered the last few meters between them with a determination mirroring his own.

Her right hand came into contact with his face, his cold, hatred-filled skin. Her left palm rested on an elegantly dressed, shallow chest. She could make out never-healed fractures of old ribs.

She found her focus, right under her hands. For the first time since landing on Exegol, she had been certain about what she had to do, and she didn't need anyone's permission and neither could anyone have held her back from what she now considered the only possible solution.

She could feel the old man struggle against her pure healing energy, she could tell he was trying to swallow in the incoming bright energy, but not even he could take more when so much was already being redirected willingly. Faint sparks were flying from under her palm, strength running in their family, but Rey found it soothing, calming, balancing. She was giving, giving from the power she never thought she had possessed, and yet it appeared to be empowering her too. The Sith chanting was now reduced to distant and indecorous screams of futile resistance, and the previously strong bond dissipated under her touch as his body no longer relied on the unnatural connection between existence and annihilation. Somewhere far from them the memories and spirits of ancient Jedi were in turmoil, but she chose to ignore their guidance for now. She asked for nobody's permission.

No matter the past, a healthy person no longer needed the Dark Side to keep him alive. His fusion to the far side of the life-death borderline was rendered meaningless by the burst of her healing energy. Rey was generously giving, instinctively, but not thoughtlessly.

She kept her consciousness, but just barely. She had never before healed anybody who should have been dead and had been kept alive only through the darkest powers the Force could grant. It was a tickling, dizzying sensation, and she heard a chorus of distant voices screaming 'What are you doing?!' inside her head. She ignored those voices. She also ignored her grandfather's much more terrified bellowing of 'Nooooo!' as the Force healing him had first made unnecessary and then, severed that unnaturally strong connection to the Dark Side.

Now no longer fused to ancient evil, no longer powered by his Sith foregoers, her grandfather crumbled and fell from the crane's tiny liftable chamber into his granddaughter's waiting arms. He wasn't exactly good-looking like he had been during his years as a senator from Naboo, and his hair couldn't grow back in the one or two minutes the healing had taken, but he was a far cry from the monster he had allowed the Darkness to transform him into at the Empire's birth.

And, for the first time in who knows how long, he was truly defenceless, now that his sick fusion to the Dark Side of the Force was undone.

Ben Solo, with his former brothers in arms no longer on his tail, entered the hall to the sight of a victoriously grinning Rey cuddling an unconscious former senator, as if shielding him from the confused, thundering storm of Darkness that had apparently lost its center. "What am I missing?" he asked, the blue-bladed lightsaber almost falling out of his hand.

"We are both Palpatines," Rey replied, the warm smile still on her face. "We take our own ways, regardless of how many plans and traditions we throw out the window in the process. He didn't expect me to heal him, but how could I not? He's my only family left, and on Jakku, I learned not to be picky and just grab what's mine without complaints."

"Scavenger," the former Kylo Ren agreed, taking a hesitant last step closer. "May I?"

At the granddaughter's nod of consent, he took the weak, unconscious former Emperor from her arms and laid him on the ground, crouching down next to him. With a gloved hand he pulled up an eyelid to reveal a blue iris neither had seen before.

Above their heads, the battle between monstrous destroyers and independent small ships continued.

"I don't think he has much time left," Ben stated after examining him for a while. "Don't get me wrong, but you've stripped the darkness from him thoroughly, and he's quite at the end of his natural life."

"It's never been about time," Rey admitted. "More like..." she began, but both of them knew how the sentence would end and neither felt comfortable saying it out loud.

More like, about not murdering a family member.

Looking up at a particularly bright explosion, Rey demanded, "Tell your fleet to return to the surface."

"Why?" Ben turned his gaze starwards as well.

"Because you're the Supreme Leader," Rey answered. "And one of my best friends was a stormtrooper once."

"Speaking of your friends, tell them to cease destroying my fleet," Ben Solo grimaced, standing up, then he politely helped up Rey too – not like she had ever really needed his help with anything.

Gratefully squeezing his hand, Rey cast one last look at her grandfather's quietly breathing figure. "I need to get back to the X-wing."

She ran a soothing hand on the right cheek of her entire surviving family, and noted a wave of jealousy from the young Supreme Leader.

"What's yourexpert opinion, Rey? Do you think I may also be scavenged, even if against my own will?"

"What does your heart tell you?"

"That it hopes so."

Just as she hugged him, a surge of now-unfocused darkness flashed through the hall of unnatural powers, as if Exegol itself realized just now the absence of the Sith at its core.

"This one time, I'm sending you away," Ben said. Then, remembering that the fighter Rey arrived in has only one seat, he added, "I'll pass him to you when you're safe." There was an unspoken question in his voice.

"Ahch-to," Rey immediately supplied. "I'd better get going."

As she turned to leave, she caught motion in the corner of her eye. A defeated man was sitting up, old blue eyes gazing at his granddaughter:

"May I say, congratulations."

Rey smiled, a victorious Palpatine, then looked back at Ben.

"Your fleet," she reminded him.

"Yours too," the Supreme Leader urged her.

They parted ways, relying on their unique bond to keep in touch for now.

The Order fleet and the swarm of civilian ships disengaged, and Ben Solo was left alone to start negotiations that would, perhaps for a little longer than last time, grant true peace to the galaxy.


End file.
